When search engines look at your website, the first thing they see is your web address, or its URL. SEO, Search Engine Optimization, refers to how much search engines "like" your site. Learn how to make URLs SEO friendly so search engines place your site higher up in the search results, helping more people find your website.

Steps

1

Figure out what your keywords are in the page. (Keywords are the few words you expect people to type into the search engine when looking for what your web page will give them.) Certain common words are ignored by search engines. In SEO, these common words are called "stop words." Remove any stop words from your keyword list.

2

Look at the keyword list, and pick the main 2 to 5 keywords that describe the subject matter or topic of the page. Too few keywords won't help you much, but too many will produce keyword spam, which is off-putting to search engines and live visitors alike. Many websites offer "density checker" tools to scan a web page and tell you what the top keywords are, but you'll also want to use online resources to check how stiff the competition is for those keywords.

3

Purge the keywords of special characters. URLs have to reinterpret special characters into a code, which doesn't work well with many social networking sites. (For example, %20 is the code for a space in a URL.)

4

Drop any periods from your keywords. Periods aren't recognized by search engines, so they don't affect your URL SEO. Including the period can confuse programs about what file type your web page actually is.

5

Create a page URL that contains those few primary keywords. Use all lower-case letters because that is what most people generally will look for, and URLs are case-sensitive.

Community Q&A

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Tips

Remember what web languages are used to code your site if you're including the file type in your URL. That will affect what file name extensions your pages must have to display properly. If you use a server-side scripting language like ASP or PHP, you may get errors on some browsers if you end your pages with ".html."

Once you put your web page online, avoid changing the web address even if you did not optimize the URL. You'll lose links and readers to the old, broken URL. If you absolutely must change the URL, use a 303 permanent redirect.

Warnings

Don't use underscores (_) to separate keywords. Use hyphens (-) and directories as shown in this example: www.website.com/DIRECTORY/sample.html. Search engines "read" underscores. They ignore hyphens and slashes.

Avoid putting numbers in the URL unless they are pertinent to the page topic. Otherwise, they'll just look like filler to search engines and live visitors alike.